Replication Dataset

Paper: Interpreting Spillovers: The ECB, Fed Interest Rate Hikes, and the Persistence of Dollar Dominance

Author

Pálma Polyák
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Manuela Moschella
University of Bologna

Dataset Overview

This dataset contains the material used to analyze how European Central Bank (ECB) policymakers interpret monetary spillovers from U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.

The analysis draws on three complementary corpora:

ECB speeches and official communications

Financial Times media coverage quoting ECB officials

European Parliament Monetary Dialogue hearings

Together these sources allow the paper to trace how spillovers are framed across multiple arenas of monetary policy discourse.

The dataset is provided as a single Excel file containing several sheets with the coded material and supporting data.

Data Sources
ECB Speech Corpus

The ECB publishes all Governing Council members’ speeches in a publicly accessible database that can be downloaded in CSV format. This database provides direct access to policymakers’ views, typically expressed in prepared remarks, and therefore constitutes the most systematic record of the institution’s public self-presentation.

At the same time, the corpus has known limitations. Official speeches may involve strategic communication and public positioning rather than fully revealing policymakers’ preferences. In addition, topic allocation within the ECB often associates specific themes with particular officials.

In practice, substantive discussions of international spillovers are concentrated among a small number of Governing Council members. The Chief Economist, Philip Lane, frequently provides analytical assessments of global monetary conditions, while Fabio Panetta has often addressed the international dimension of ECB policy.

To construct the corpus used in this paper, the full speech database was screened using the following keywords:

spillover
Federal Reserve
Fed
exchange rate
dollar
imported inflation
financial conditions

For each keyword occurrence, sentence triplets were extracted consisting of:

• the sentence containing the keyword
• the immediately preceding sentence
• the immediately following sentence

These triplets preserve sufficient context to interpret the statement.

A qualitative assessment was then used to identify passages directly discussing spillovers from U.S. monetary policy. This process identified six speeches with substantive or exclusive focus on the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases.

Media Corpus: Financial Times

Media coverage provides an important complement to the speech corpus because journalists frequently quote ECB officials – sometimes anonymously – offering rare visibility into internal debates.

This source helps mitigate the speech database’s topic allocation bias by capturing views that may not appear in official speeches.

The Financial Times was selected as the media source because it is the leading financial newspaper in Europe and is widely regarded for its authoritative reporting on monetary and financial affairs. The FT also maintains unusually close access to ECB policymakers.

Because copyright restrictions prevent automated scraping, the corpus was constructed through targeted Boolean searches in the FT archive using the following search structure:

(ECB) AND ("Federal Reserve" OR Fed) AND (Lagarde OR Panetta OR Schnabel OR de Guindos OR Nagel OR Holzmann OR Villeroy OR "central bank governor" OR official OR person)

To limit noise, the search focused on two periods when the U.S.–euro area interest rate differential was particularly salient:

April–June 2022
the initial phase of the Federal Reserve’s rapid tightening cycle while the ECB lagged behind

April–June 2024
a period when ECB rate cuts were anticipated while the Federal Reserve maintained higher rates

The searches produced:

43 relevant articles for 2022
30 relevant articles for 2024

for a total of 73 articles.

From these articles, all passages directly quoting or paraphrasing ECB officials were extracted and coded.

Monetary Dialogue Corpus

To capture spillover interpretations under direct political questioning, the dataset includes material from the European Parliament Monetary Dialogues between the ECB President and the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON).

These hearings constitute the ECB’s main forum of democratic accountability, where the ECB President must respond to questions from elected representatives (Ferrara et al. 2022; Ferrara et al. 2025).

The dataset includes all nine Monetary Dialogue hearings held between 2022 and 2024.

Using the same keyword list employed in the speech corpus, sentence triplets were extracted from President Christine Lagarde’s responses.

The strength of this corpus lies in observing how spillover diagnoses are articulated under questioning by elected representatives. Its limitation is that it captures only the views of the ECB President rather than the full Governing Council.

Triangulation Strategy

Each corpus has clear limitations:

• ECB speeches may reflect stylized institutional communication
• Financial Times coverage is episodic and mediated by journalistic selection
• Monetary Dialogue hearings capture only the ECB President under parliamentary questioning

Taken individually, none of these sources provides a comprehensive view of internal ECB deliberations.

Taken together, however, they allow triangulation across multiple arenas of monetary policy discourse, making it possible to identify recurring patterns in how spillovers are interpreted.

File Structure

The dataset is provided as a single Excel file containing multiple sheets.

Sheet1 — ECB Speech Corpus

Full corpus of ECB speeches used for the analysis.

Key variables include:

date — date of the speech
speaker — ECB policymaker
title — speech title
subtitle — official description
speech_text — full text of the speech
spillover — coding marker identifying spillover references
imported_inflation — indicator for references to exchange-rate spillovers

Additional columns reflect intermediate coding notes used during analysis.

Sheet2 — Sentence Triplets (Spillover Coding)

Contains the extracted sentence triplets used in the qualitative coding.

Each observation corresponds to a passage discussing spillovers.

Variables include:

date
speaker
speech title
sentence excerpt
spillover classification

Spillovers are coded according to the mechanism emphasized in the passage:

financial — spillovers via global financial markets, capital flows, or financial conditions
trade — spillovers via exchange rates, competitiveness, or imported inflation
unclear — cases where the mechanism is ambiguous

Sheet3 — Monetary Dialogue Corpus

Contains excerpts from European Parliament Monetary Dialogue hearings between 2022 and 2024.

Variables include:

hearing date
speaker
question context
Lagarde response excerpt

Sheet4 — Interest Rate Differential Data

Monthly data used to illustrate the divergence between U.S. and euro area monetary policy.

Variables:

date
Fed — Federal Reserve policy rate
ECB — ECB policy rate
interest_rate_differential — difference between the two policy rates

Replication

The dataset allows readers to:

• trace all coded references to monetary spillovers
• reproduce the qualitative analysis of spillover interpretations
• verify the empirical basis for the paper’s argument about ECB discourse and dollar dominance